6 ms·

There is a surplus of cheap labor in the United States (at least up until recently), for the amount of goods and services produced. You may not believe it, bu

There is a surplus of cheap labor in the United States (at least up until recently), for the amount of goods and services produced. You may not believe it, but it is true. We have people willing to take jobs at low wages (again, up until recently) because of the growth of automation, outsourcing of low wage jobs to countries with even more labor surplus, and immigration. All these things, I will say off the bat, being good things that are producing good for people. (aside from the question, how many people can our planet sustain) "How can you tell people they are not welcome to live in the cities where they work" is a nice feel good thing to say, but those are feelings. Liberal city people seem to care a lot about feelings. But what matters, and how people actually behave, is what options and choices and reality people have to decide based on. And I might just point out, you probably don't care equally as much about the young families who are in the tech industry who "get told they can't afford to buy a house where they work". Anyway. No public policy can escape the fundamental demographic truth that we have a surplus of labor, and as cruel as it may sound, as long as people are willing to take the job for less, people will be coming to work in the Bay Area and yet not be able to live there. Liberal city policymakers believe that forcing cities to pay living wages or mandating housing will "make people feel welcome and that they belong" but there is no escaping these fundamental forces of wage depression due to labor surplus. Then trying to "fix it" by guaranteeing people housing or forcing affordable housing to be true through rent control etc. just creates more unintended side effects elsewhere. It creates housing shortages, sky high rents where not rent controlled, and protects the very NIMBYism that this article is about (where liberal people, believing their responsibility to be fulfilled through tampering with the market, now refuse to give on actual meaningful changes). And most of all, it makes those who had the good luck to get in, better off than those who weren't chosen to receive those benefits. As much as good intentions are nice, they rarely lead to good outcomes when applied at that level of thinking.

nemothekid 5y ago
I can't understand how this diatribe is related to housing. The NY times article mentioned by GP shows clearly "liberal cities" don't give a shit about mandating housing anymore than "conservatives cities" do; it's a false choice, Americans as whole want to preserve housing as an investment asset class. Every decision flows downward from there, and any other division is simply a distraction from the actual issue.
- kelnos 5y ago
  And that's the problem. People's basic needs should not be an investment asset class.
  - paisawalla 5y ago
    Housing may be a basic need, but ample housing with a convenient commute is not. Proponents of change need to do a better job of filtering out their obvious sympathies towards wealth redistribution, and stating the problem more acutely. I'm not here to give every dishwasher and barista a 10-minute walking commute and a living room with a view of the city center.
  - EricDeb 5y ago
    totally agree. the problem is people's morals on it change when their house is up 200k
hypersoar 5y ago
GP posed a question about why affordable housing in any particular place should be a goal. I offered an answer. The market price of labor, or of anything else, does not come to us as if handed down by God. It is the result of a social calculation reflecting the things our society values and how much it values them. The fact that MANGA engineers are paid more than teachers is informed by how much we've decided teachers are worth. If everybody woke up tomorrow and decided teachers were more important than we thought today, then teachers would probably get paid more. Our societal values feed into our prices. In this way, we are morally culpable for the consequences of this calculation, and it is incumbent upon us to change things of the results are unjust. For example, by taking a bunch of money from rich people and giving it to poor people. Or by creating conditions for widely-available affordable housing. And I'm not just saying we "guarantee" the housing. We have the state go in and build it. By the way, I live in Seattle, which raised it's minimum wage to $15 a few years ago to much doomsaying. Research after the fact found no effect on unemployment. It begins to seem to me like the style of laissez-faire economics that have dominated politics for decades (which I recognize may not have much to do with academic economics) is full of shit. And, yeah, you better believe I care about feelings. Feelings are the filter through which all human experience flows. The economy exists for us, not us for it What good is strong growth if the system that brings it about makes us all miserable?
- supernova87a 5y ago
  We live in a democratic system in which the rules say when a majority of people (through their representatives) believe that a change to some policy may make things better, the majority can implement those rules. Now, you can go out and convince people that doing something like this will be in their best long term interests, and by all means do so. We have had campaigns in our history that convinced us in a phase change that, for example: -- smoking was bad -- food and drug regulation was effective -- we should have traffic and road safety standards -- the list goes on and on And in many cases, after such laws were passed, everyone realized that yes, it was better and we wouldn't change it back. Let's campaign for higher teacher pay. Yes. Let's advocate and convince people that more housing is needed. Great, I agree. But let the democratic process back it. Now another way is if you change the rules by which democracy operates to encode a general ability for "enlightened fiat" to enable some group that knows better to decide that the things it favors are positive and should be done even if many / most people disagree. This has not gone so well in the past. Just because you used it in a way that you agree with, who is to guarantee that others with not so good intentions (or even just competence) also pass different laws that aren't so good. As a certain unpleasant senator says, "you may come to regret it sooner than you realize." What I dislike is when people believe they're right from a moralistic point of view — on a very particular and self-selected cause — take it upon themselves to experiment using other people's lives, and add layer upon layer of tinkering onto the systems by which many people have learned to live effectively, trying to solve certain emotionally-touching problems but creating more as they go because the depth of their solution never keeps up with the depth of reality and exceptions to the solution. Don't discount the fact that the system that we have today produced the greatest prosperity and increase in standards of living for many, many people, before you tinker with it. I don't disagree that some of your goals may be good. In fact I think climate change may be such a problem that needs fiat to overcome popular will. Or public health crises, for example. But I don't know all the side effects and unintended consequences. For that reason, I don't support you (for example) just being able to say, "I know this is for the greater good so we should put this exception into place against people's democratic choices desiring not to do that thing." Raising a minimum wage definitely does not rise to the level of governing by fiat. And I don’t know how you decided that one issue was the one to invoke this power on. For now, go out and convince people that they should adopt it by an overwhelming majority. Then I will have no criticism. If they don’t wish to adopt it, maybe it is the fate of the US that democracy cannot survive into middle age and still make the right decisions when people get old, wealthy, and complacent. But let people decide that America has declined because of it and it’s in their best interest to do so. People are still coming to the US to work for minimum wage. Why are you second guessing that they find it still worth it? Finally, your example of Seattle minimum has been shown to be full of holes. Just because Seattle's bubble could do it (so far) and not show noticeable unemployment doesn't mean it holds in general. Just ask everyone whose jobs were outsourced to India whether a lower relative wage provides a large incentive to shift labor away from a place with high costs. It's patently apparent it does have effects.
Quarrelsome 5y ago
> "How can you tell people they are not welcome to live in the cities where they work" is a nice feel good thing to say, but those are feelings. If you need it written in selfish then the issue is that eventually businesses will struggle to attract these sorts of workers and/or those workers will start living rough or sleeping in their car as a workaround. This causes hard to measure inefficiencies or other social problems and this all increases cost to business or other economic or social costs. The wheels of the economy function much better if everybody has affordable, secure shelter with a reasonable commute. I don't see how its "feelings" state this, its just basic modelling.
imtringued 5y ago
>outsourcing of low wage jobs to countries with even more labor surplus, I have to admit, globalization has winners and losers. The nation as a whole is winning but a small portion is losing out and the worst part is that we blame them for that.

nemothekid 5y ago

I can't understand how this diatribe is related to housing. The NY times article mentioned by GP shows clearly "liberal cities" don't give a shit about mandating housing anymore than "conservatives cities" do; it's a false choice, Americans as whole want to preserve housing as an investment asset class. Every decision flows downward from there, and any other division is simply a distraction from the actual issue.

kelnos 5y ago
And that's the problem. People's basic needs should not be an investment asset class.
- paisawalla 5y ago
  Housing may be a basic need, but ample housing with a convenient commute is not. Proponents of change need to do a better job of filtering out their obvious sympathies towards wealth redistribution, and stating the problem more acutely. I'm not here to give every dishwasher and barista a 10-minute walking commute and a living room with a view of the city center.
- EricDeb 5y ago
  totally agree. the problem is people's morals on it change when their house is up 200k

hypersoar 5y ago

GP posed a question about why affordable housing in any particular place should be a goal. I offered an answer. The market price of labor, or of anything else, does not come to us as if handed down by God. It is the result of a social calculation reflecting the things our society values and how much it values them. The fact that MANGA engineers are paid more than teachers is informed by how much we've decided teachers are worth. If everybody woke up tomorrow and decided teachers were more important than we thought today, then teachers would probably get paid more. Our societal values feed into our prices. In this way, we are morally culpable for the consequences of this calculation, and it is incumbent upon us to change things of the results are unjust. For example, by taking a bunch of money from rich people and giving it to poor people. Or by creating conditions for widely-available affordable housing. And I'm not just saying we "guarantee" the housing. We have the state go in and build it. By the way, I live in Seattle, which raised it's minimum wage to $15 a few years ago to much doomsaying. Research after the fact found no effect on unemployment. It begins to seem to me like the style of laissez-faire economics that have dominated politics for decades (which I recognize may not have much to do with academic economics) is full of shit. And, yeah, you better believe I care about feelings. Feelings are the filter through which all human experience flows. The economy exists for us, not us for it What good is strong growth if the system that brings it about makes us all miserable?

supernova87a 5y ago
We live in a democratic system in which the rules say when a majority of people (through their representatives) believe that a change to some policy may make things better, the majority can implement those rules. Now, you can go out and convince people that doing something like this will be in their best long term interests, and by all means do so. We have had campaigns in our history that convinced us in a phase change that, for example: -- smoking was bad -- food and drug regulation was effective -- we should have traffic and road safety standards -- the list goes on and on And in many cases, after such laws were passed, everyone realized that yes, it was better and we wouldn't change it back. Let's campaign for higher teacher pay. Yes. Let's advocate and convince people that more housing is needed. Great, I agree. But let the democratic process back it. Now another way is if you change the rules by which democracy operates to encode a general ability for "enlightened fiat" to enable some group that knows better to decide that the things it favors are positive and should be done even if many / most people disagree. This has not gone so well in the past. Just because you used it in a way that you agree with, who is to guarantee that others with not so good intentions (or even just competence) also pass different laws that aren't so good. As a certain unpleasant senator says, "you may come to regret it sooner than you realize." What I dislike is when people believe they're right from a moralistic point of view — on a very particular and self-selected cause — take it upon themselves to experiment using other people's lives, and add layer upon layer of tinkering onto the systems by which many people have learned to live effectively, trying to solve certain emotionally-touching problems but creating more as they go because the depth of their solution never keeps up with the depth of reality and exceptions to the solution. Don't discount the fact that the system that we have today produced the greatest prosperity and increase in standards of living for many, many people, before you tinker with it. I don't disagree that some of your goals may be good. In fact I think climate change may be such a problem that needs fiat to overcome popular will. Or public health crises, for example. But I don't know all the side effects and unintended consequences. For that reason, I don't support you (for example) just being able to say, "I know this is for the greater good so we should put this exception into place against people's democratic choices desiring not to do that thing." Raising a minimum wage definitely does not rise to the level of governing by fiat. And I don’t know how you decided that one issue was the one to invoke this power on. For now, go out and convince people that they should adopt it by an overwhelming majority. Then I will have no criticism. If they don’t wish to adopt it, maybe it is the fate of the US that democracy cannot survive into middle age and still make the right decisions when people get old, wealthy, and complacent. But let people decide that America has declined because of it and it’s in their best interest to do so. People are still coming to the US to work for minimum wage. Why are you second guessing that they find it still worth it? Finally, your example of Seattle minimum has been shown to be full of holes. Just because Seattle's bubble could do it (so far) and not show noticeable unemployment doesn't mean it holds in general. Just ask everyone whose jobs were outsourced to India whether a lower relative wage provides a large incentive to shift labor away from a place with high costs. It's patently apparent it does have effects.

Quarrelsome 5y ago

> "How can you tell people they are not welcome to live in the cities where they work" is a nice feel good thing to say, but those are feelings. If you need it written in selfish then the issue is that eventually businesses will struggle to attract these sorts of workers and/or those workers will start living rough or sleeping in their car as a workaround. This causes hard to measure inefficiencies or other social problems and this all increases cost to business or other economic or social costs. The wheels of the economy function much better if everybody has affordable, secure shelter with a reasonable commute. I don't see how its "feelings" state this, its just basic modelling.

imtringued 5y ago

>outsourcing of low wage jobs to countries with even more labor surplus, I have to admit, globalization has winners and losers. The nation as a whole is winning but a small portion is losing out and the worst part is that we blame them for that.